Turkey's Electoral Geography: Trends, Behaviors and Identities.

• Author: Cakin, Berfin

Edited by Edip Asaf Bekaroglu and Gulsen Kaya Osmanbasoglu

New York: Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics, 2021, 204 pages, ISBN: 9780367632793

E. Ozbudun's 2013 analogy of "three maladies" affecting Turkish politics (fragmentation, volatility, and polarization) is widely used to explain multiparty politics in Turkey. (1) Although the existing literature is rich with attempts to identify the main "maladies" of the political system in Turkey, (2) Turkey's Electoral Geography, edited by Edip Asaf Bekaroglu and Gulsen Kaya Osmanbasoglu, adds regionalization as the fourth malady, and identifies this phenomenon as the explanatory factor behind electoral geography in Turkey, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s. The book consists of nine chapters that seek to answer the question of how Turkey's electoral geography, which is currently divided along lines of identity rather than socio-economic issues, has been shaped in terms of voting behavior, political parties, the party system, nationalization, and regionalization, gender issues, identity dynamics, and ideological polarization.

In the first chapter, Bekaroglu and Osmanbasoglu introduce the concept of electoral geography and the historical background of Turkey's electoral geography since 1950. The importance of electoral geography requires understanding spatial dynamics in Turkey with reference to the rise of identity politics in voter preferences, especially since the 1990s. The authors underline the rise of Kurdish and Islamist political parties in the 1990s, which can be seen as the most important dynamics shaping voter preferences in Turkish politics in the 2000s.

In the second chapter, Demirkol and Bekaroglu interrogate why the Proportional Representation (PR) System in Turkey led to lower nationalization, while PR in other countries generally results in increases in party nationalization. The authors explain that this phenomenon in Turkey is related to two factors: military interventions and the institutional design of the electoral system. The change from the majority system to PR and the closing of the Democrat Party (DP), the most nationalized party of the 1950s, as well as the rise of identity politics since the 1990s, have decreased the nationalization of the party system.

In the third chapter, Bekaroglu and Osmanbasoglu examine the attempts at gerrymandering in Turkish electoral politics. Gerrymandering refers to the practice of manipulating electoral districts and borders for...